In recent years, with the continuous development of 3G mobile communication technology, the data service from a wireless terminal has become a mainstream of the communication industry to serve a user. As the number of terminals continuously increases, the problem with the deployment of the terminal service of an operating company is the exhaustion of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. An effective way to solve the problem is to upgrade the network to an IPv6 network. However, deploying an IPv6 network is a gradual process. The IPv4 and IPv6 networks face a long-term coexistence situation. In order to adapt to the situation, a wireless data terminal should support access to both the IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Therefore, the wireless data terminal has to support an IPv4 single stack, an IPv6 single stack, and an IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack, and may connect one network or connect two networks simultaneously.
There are two ways to connect a wireless data terminal to a network through a computer. One way is to virtualize the terminal as a serial port to connect it to a network through a Point to Point Protocol (PPP); the other way is to virtualize the terminal complying with a Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) as an Ethernet port to connect it to a network. Existing wireless data terminal may adopt the two networking ways described above at the same time.
The wireless data terminal supports IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack networking, which may be divided into single Packet Data Protocol (PDP) dual stack networking and dual PDP dual stack networking. In order to support the dual stack networking, the number of the ports of the wireless data terminal may be expanded. Different types of terminals have different expansion ways. For a terminal only supporting serial port dialing, one port complying with the NDIS standard specification may be added to support dual stack networking. For an original port complying with the NDIS standard specification, a port of the same type may be expanded again to support dual stack networking. There are also other ways in which a wireless data terminal supports dual stack networking. In the prior art, regardless of which method is adopted, for a data terminal supporting IPv4 and IPv6 single stack or dual stack network connection, the method for connecting IPv4 is different from the method for connecting IPv6, so different terminal management systems need to be used to perform networking, which increases the development difficulty of the system, reduces the reliability of the system, brings much inconvenience to users, and reduces the satisfaction of user experience.